Sunday, December 16, 2012

CAPTCHAS enable computer programs to determine if a person or a robot is requesting access. Usually, it is desirable to block robots from accessing a program.

Some people are sight-impaired and must use audio CAPTCHAs.

If you want, you can hear Google's audio reCAPTCHAs by clicking any Blogger Comments icon, and then Audio.

Here is the large bug:

If you listen to the Google Blogger audio reCAPTCHA instructions, they say: "Please type every digit (e.g. 1, 2, 3, 4) you hear". The problem is the visual instructions for the same audio reCAPTCHA are: "Type the words (e.g. one, two, three, four) you hear".

"In the Source field, you can
identify a specific publication whose articles you'd like to see
exclusively in your search results. Likewise, in the Location field you can specify from what geographic location you'd like to see articles."

This is the small search bug: The "Location" label is ambiguous.
"Location" can mean the news stories occur in a particular location, or
the news sources are located in that location.

Google's intent is that the publication sources are in a particular location.

To fix the ambiguous field labels I suggest these three fields instead:

If you display the default 10 results per Web page, you would have to click Next about 2.5 billion times to get to the last entries. At a second a page, that's approximately 80 years.

The number of results can indicate the popularity of a set of search keywords. However, I'm going to call the multi-billion results metric a bug because most search results are not accessible by users.

Would an ice-cream shop list 25 flavors if it can really serve only the 5 most popular flavors?